Chicago photographer Paul Octavious' love affair with Cricket Hill

Chicago photographer Paul Octavious has photographed Cricket Hill, near Montrose Harbor, from the same perspective, twice a week, for nearly four years. (Paul Octavious)

Cricket Hill is an archetypal hill, the most perfect hill in Chicago. It’s between Montrose Avenue Beach and Lake Shore Drive, overlooking Montrose Harbor. It was once a cricket field; now it’s surrounded by soccer fields and populated with growling coaches. It’s 45 feet tall and has a casual incline that slopes gently upward, not too steep, not too modest. It’s ideal for laying back. Movies are shown here every summer. Mourners gathered here to sing Grateful Dead songs when Jerry Garciadied, and thousands turned out for an impromptu memorial here after John Lennonwas murdered. Novelist Aleksandar Hemon plays soccer here.

Cricket Hill has four stars on Yelp. Five stars were available, but one reviewer docked it for lacking shade. That seems misguided: What Cricket Hill lacks in shade, it makes up for in wind, and among its many jobs, Cricket Hill will play host to the Chicago Kids and Kites festival — which is May 19, actually. It’s just as easy, though, to imagine Cricket Hill as the natural stage of an ongoing theater. Stand west of Cricket Hill, look upward from its base and the sky above its peak appears oddly flat, as if painted on an enormous backdrop.

It’s this last purpose, however imagined, that draws Paul Octavious to Cricket Hill. Since early 2008, he has been coming here twice a week, in the rain, snow and sun, to photograph Cricket Hill’s unwitting cast, each picture becoming a new installment in his ongoing personal art project, “Same Hill, Different Day.” You might even say Octavious, 28, a freelance commercial photographer, is the unofficial photographer of Cricket Hill.

His pictures, all of which feature that same flat sky and soft curve, document movie nights, snow days, soccer leagues, fireworks, police helicopters, parents towing screaming children. And because he has a fondness for dioramas, the people in his pictures tend to resemble miniatures, inserted on an artificial stage.

On a drizzly spring day at the hill, a child kicked a soccer ball. A teenager reclined at the peak. Octavious pulled out his iPhone and snapped the image. Then picked up his Cannon and took another. Then found his Polaroid Instamatic and clicked a third. “It always feels so random,” he said, giggling at his latest cast of subjects, then: “Plus the hill — I drew that shape as a kid when I drew hills. It looks totally crafted, like, too good to be true.”

Indeed, it is.

Cricket Hill was built in 1948 from the dirt of a nearby construction site, its shape landscaped. Octavious, who moved here from Connecticut four years ago to be house photographer for clothing company Threadless, stumbled upon the hill one winter afternoon. He lives nearby and noticed neighborhood kids dragging their sleds down the street. Their destination was Cricket Hill. Octavious, though, never calls it that. He thinks of it as a blank slate or an empty stage — “I just call it ‘the hill,’ that way it’s sort of everyone’s perfect hill.”

Smart idea: His pictures, which he posts on pauloctavious.com, have a cult following. His Instagram updates (hashtag #samehilldifferentday) go out to 91,000 followers. And later this month, the Logan Square restaurant Longman & Eagle will offer customers a complimentary newspaper featuring his photos — just because. Still, occasionally, a friend from out of town will visit Octavious and ask to see the hill. They’ll walk down Wilson Avenue, pass under the viaducts and step through the light curtain of trees that separate green space from pavement. Then, inevitably, the friend will stand at the hill and say, “So that’s your hill. It’s just a hill.”

“It is,” he’ll respond.

Sometimes friends will ask Octavious if he has plans to move back East, to leave for New York. When people ask that, he tends to respond the same way: “Well, I don’t know,” he says. “Do they have a hill?”